Steve Martini - The Jury

He looks as if he hasn’t had a good meal in two days. I order up appetizers, chicken wings and some stuffed mushrooms.

Frank kills time with small talk, his latest job, a mansion for some software mogul. He’s been hauling one-ton beams into the basement for a mammoth hearth single-handedly. Using leverage, he moves the hundred-year-old timbers that he has salvaged from some closed-down mill in Colorado. Anyone wondering how the pyramids were built might want to discuss the matter with Frank.

I can tell he is waiting for the waitress to come back so that we won’t be disturbed. The drinks come first. Five minutes later the food, and Frank doesn’t hesitate. He’s into the mushrooms and chicken wings. “These are good,” he says, then notices that I’m not eating. He puts the chicken wing down on the little plate in front of him, self-conscious eyes looking around.

“You gonna have some?” he says.

“Sure.” I pick up a wing to keep him company.

“You’re wondering why I need to talk?” he says.

I smile.

“It wasn’t to get a meal. Or a free drink.”

“I didn’t think it was, Frank. You probably want what we actually owe you for your work in the office,” I tell him. Frank had handcrafted some bookshelves for us into some tight spaces in the office and charged us five hundred dollars for two thousand dollars’ worth of work. When I tried to pay him more, he wouldn’t take it, saying that what I had done for Penny was more than enough.

“I need a divorce.” He says it just like that. Like “Pass the salt.”

I don’t say anything, but he can read stunned silence when he sees it.

“It’s the health insurance,” he says. “I need a divorce because of the medical-insurance thing. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I tell him.

“Fine. But I’m not gonna eat unless you do.”

I spear a mushroom with a toothpick, if only to make him feel comfortable.

“It’s Penny,” he says. He picks up the chicken wing and starts to nibble on it, but I can tell his heart is not in it. He has lost the yen to eat and drops it back on the plate. Instead he goes to the drink, something to dull the senses. Takes a swig from the bottle, ignoring the glass that the waitress poured and is half full, shrinking by the head.

“Her medical expenses are huge.”

“I can imagine.”

“I don’t know that you can. Last month it was twenty-five thousand dollars.”

He’s right. I didn’t have a clue. He looks at me over the bottle caught by the neck in his large hand.

“You’re wondering where would I get that kind of money? Until last Tuesday, from the insurance company. But that’s about to end. A lifetime million-dollar cap,” he says. “We’ve bumped up against it with Penny. That’s why we need the divorce.” He puts the bottle down on the table and leans forward, a salesman about to make his pitch.

“Doris and I talked about it. She didn’t want to do it either, but you see, it’s really the only way. We were up ’til three in the morning, talking.”

I can see it in Frank’s bloodshot eyes.

“She wants to divorce you?”

“God knows why she didn’t do it years ago,” he says. “I haven’t been a great provider. A lot of squandered opportunities. If I’d stayed a schoolteacher, at least they’d have health insurance. Doris and the kids. Most of the wood I work on has more brains that I do. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions.”

I tell him he’s being too hard on himself.

At this moment I wish I had a few million in the bank I could loan him. Fact is, I’m tapped out, new practice in a new city.

“I’ve looked for jobs. But who’s gonna hire some burned-out termite? Besides, as soon as they find out about Penny they always come up with some reason not to take me on. Suddenly they’ve filled the position. No longer hiring.”

“You have your own business.”

“Yeah. Right.” He laughs.

“This is the extent of my business.” He holds up his leathered hands. “My only assets. According to the bank,” he says. “And I can’t sell them or mortgage them, not even for body parts. So where does that leave me? Where does it leave Doris and the kids?” He’s looking at me now, leaning across the table, whispering like this is some secret cabal.

“The insurance guy tells us there’s nothing he can do. Hell, if I hadn’t had the policy for years before Penny came along, they would have canceled us years ago. Fact is, we’re uninsurable,” he says. “That means the house, everything is on the block. They’ll take it all, every dime. My kids are gonna end up on the street,” he says. “I’d be better off dead.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” he says. “At least they’d have a roof over their heads. I’ve got a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Paid up.” He tells me his parents had bought this for him years before, in case something happened on one of his jobs.

“Borrow against the cash value,” I tell him.

“There is none. Straight term policy.”

I tell him to relax, to calm down. But my words sound like what they are, the bravado and encouragement of the unaffected.

“Let’s think about options,” I tell him.

“What options? There aren’t any.” He finishes his drink and raises his bottle toward the waitress. “This one’s on me.”

The waitress comes over. I order a beer. Frank needs the gesture, if only to buy some pride back.

“When did you find out about the medical-insurance cap?”

“The million-dollar cap I’ve known about, but I didn’t know we were hitting up against it until last week. I guess I just didn’t think. The hospital bills went to the insurance company. We got copies and stuck ’em in a drawer. Went on for what, I don’t know. Two years, maybe.”

“Do you have any kind of appeal, to the insurance company?”

“I don’t know. You look at it.” He reaches under his coat, to the inside pocket, and hands me an envelope, ripped across the top like somebody opened it in a hurry with a finger. “It’s been burning a hole in my pocket for two days,” he says. “You keep it. Please.”

I read the letter. It is a notice of cancellation for the reason that the maximum lifetime benefits of the policy are about to be exhausted.

His second bottle comes, and Frank starts on it.

“Do you have a copy of the policy?”

“At home,” he says. “Someplace.”

“We need to look at it.”

“Why? I suppose I could argue with them over the numbers. But I don’t think I’d win.”

“You think you’re into them for that much? A million dollars?” I ask.

He nods. “Yeah, all the experimental stuff. The treatment at the university. She was hospitalized four times last year with respiratory problems, three times the year before. She can’t control the saliva. It goes down her windpipe and gets in her lungs. She gets pneumonia and then she’s in there for a month, sometimes six weeks.”

“And a divorce will solve this?”

His eyes light up like those of some grifter with a good idea. He sits up straight in the chair and leans across the table toward me, salesman about to make a close.

“Here’s what we figured. The hospital bills are gonna break our back. In two months our savings will be gone. We’ll be broke. We have the other children to worry about. I talked to Doris, and she agrees. If we get a divorce, she takes the house, my retirement and custody of the other two kids. I’ll agree to it. Division of property. That’s what they call it, right?”

“Assuming some judge is willing to accept this,” I say.

“Why wouldn’t they? If I agree to it.”

“Judges are funny,” I tell him. “Especially if they think you’re doing this to defeat creditors’ claims.”